A Work of Art
by Tea and Mystery
Summary: Ilsa moved to London, hoping for an adventure without too much danger. This however, is thrown out of the window as soon as she moves in near a certain consulting detective, becomes embroiled in the murder investigation revolving around her close friend, and a target herself. Slight AU. Involves an OC, but to what capacity, I know not. Rating may or may not be subject to change.
1. Ilsa

**Hi! So a horrible attempt, but why not! Please keep in mind English and I do not see eye to eye, as it is not my native tongue. But I am trying! Please feel free to criticise, and to repeat the words at many beginnings, I do not own any characters of this lovely arc other than my OC. Enjoy!**

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><p>Why did she move to London? That, she didn't know, besides the fact she was given the option to have a position in the Embassy there. She thought maybe it was the language, the people; they were both certainly different from her own. London was such a big place, with millions of people, none of those people caring about anything that she did, and (hopefully) wouldn't bother her. As we all know and guessed, how wrong and much too hopeful of her to assume that.<p>

She had moved London the previous week, and after much searching, found a nice basement flat from a nice old lady, Mrs. Hudson. She liked her. She reminded her of her own grandmother. She had originally went to the flat, fearing that it would be infested with mold and rats, but was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be nothing of the sort. It was very cozy, not horribly small, but not horribly big either (she couldn't stand spaces that are too large; it made her feel like she was in a haunted house because of all the small unexplained noises she could hear).

Now, as some may know, Embassies and Consulates tend to provide housing for its staff, and if not, provide details where to stay. But Ilsa, as grateful as she was with her country, didn't want its help when it came to where she was to live. She wasn't in England to live just as she had in Sweden; she came to experience, to at least some degree, to how these British lived. Which was fortunate, seeing as Mrs. Hudson was thrilled when Ilsa told her that the Swede would like to rent the flat. She said something about how most people hardly even gave it a look before leaving.

She then told Ilsa about the men upstairs; Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (if Ilsa remembered correctly). She said John was a perfect gentleman, but that Sherlock was a bit odd, and it would be best not to take anything personally when it came to what he said. Ilsa took that to heart, for the most part.

A knock at the door pulled Ilsa out of her thoughts. "Come in." she said, quickly getting off of her just-made bed, realizing her shoes had yet to be on her feet, the thought of running to work hitting her mind. The embassy had called a half and hour previous, and were apparently in need of her linguistic skills. Her long time friend, Karen Sanders, had not shown that morning, due to some reason, which left Ilsa the only one to work, even though she wasn't officially supposed to start until a few days later. Her shoes were found a few moments later under a shirt, and Ilsa was furiously attempting to put them each on the proper foot when Mrs. Hudson walked through her bedroom door. Ilsa thought she might need to talk to the dear old lady about privacy, but decided to talk to her at a later time.

Mrs. Hudson stopped a few feet short of her bed, with a fond look covering her features. "Hello, deary. The boys have stopped by for some tea. Would you like to join us? You haven't met them yet, and this would be the perfect opportunity." She said, smiling. Returning her smile, "I can come and meet them really quickly, but I will have to take a rain check on the tea I'm afraid; I just got called into work." Mrs. Hudson nodded her head and said, "Of course. Well let's not make you late. Come on." She walked out of the room, and Ilsa quickly followed her out, grabbing her overly filled bag as she did so.

She half darted, half tripped over to the other's flat and went into her kitchen. There at the table, sat two men. One had blond hair and kind brown eyes, and looked to be enjoying himself immensely. The other could not be said the same for. He clasped his pale hands together, his slim body not even moving. Ilsa looked more closely, and wasn't even sure if he was breathing. His dark hair was a very odd contrast indeed to his skin. It also looked like he had been forced to be there, and his icy blue eyes suddenly darted to snow-haired blonde as she entered the room, analyzing everything she did and everything about her appearance, as Ilsa was about to find out. The pleasant one shot the blue-eyed one a very odd look before standing. "Hello, I'm John Wat-"

"You have recently dyed your hair." The icy eyes one cut in, "You have no roots, but it is a very unnatural hair colour." He appeared to ponder for a moment. "You play violin and the piano but haven't done so in a while, probably because you move around too much to properly hone your skills. You are an only child, at, I assume, nineteen years old, and are divorced, which is hard to believe. You are from one of the countries in Scandinavia, which" he nodded briefly to himself, "would explain the colour of your hair. You also speak two languages. You don't have much money, or you wouldn't be living here. But your clothes say otherwise. You are wearing an extremely expensive coat, and the rest of your clothes are also expensive. You have an admirer who gives you these things, and you accept them, even though you don't reciprocate these feelings. You want to feel wanted. You trust without question. You are homesick." He finished, looking proud of himself. She just nodded my head and said "Wow." He was completely wrong, except for the fact that she _was_ from Scandinavia; that much was true, and she _did_ play the violin and piano, though she played them frequently and personally thought she _hadn't_ lost her touch, although she couldn't actually read music, as this quick worded man would discover later. The previously pleasant faced one, who now wore one of the most apologetic look she had thought she had ever seen, and said, "Sherlock!" looking to his companion. The name finally had a face. Sherlock Holmes was the icy one, meaning the pleasant one was John Watson.

"What did I get wrong?" Sherlock asked, "I always get something wrong." Ilsa snickered. What _didn't_ he. "Well," she started off, "I can tell you what you got right from your oh so brilliant deduction." He raised his eyebrows. She gave herself a mental high five; she had not been tongue-tied in her first sentence to a stranger, which was a very rare thing.

"Well first, I figure you should know my name. It's Ilsa Koski. You can call me Ilsey if you so please, but I doubt you will. I do play the piano and violin, that much you got right, but I still play them regularly; I haven't lost my touch. I am also from Scandinavia, but everything else you said? Wrong." she shook her head and smiled softly. "Completely and utterly wrong. I would love to explain to you everything that you got wrong, but I don't have the time or the inclination to do so." His face looked placid, but his eyes were seething. "It was nice meeting you John, Sherlock, and I will see you later Mrs. Hudson." She quickly turned on her heel and headed out the door, hearing John say, "Don't think about it Sherlock." She thought for a moment about 'Sherlock not thinking about it' and decided to take a quick trip back to the door of her flat, and made sure it was locked; she didn't know whether or not Sherlock was the type to go through her belongings, but she didn't feel like taking the chance.

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><p>After catching a taxi, she ran into the embassy, and asked the first person she saw, Aleksi Ahonen, her superior, what she was needed for. This was the third time she was meeting him. He thought for a moment, before running a hand through his slicked back hair with and an embarrassed air. "Actually Ms. Koski-"<p>

"Please, call me Ilsey." She never knew why, but she hated being called by her surname. He nodded.

"Ilsa, then. I'm sorry, I would feel disrespectful and unprofessional for calling you a nickname rather than your actual name." He responded, seeing her quizzical look, and shrugged. "We actually needed you to go to Karen's flat. You see," he gestured to a conference room, "she's already been filled in on the current issue at hand." He sighed and looked down at his feet quickly before looking back up. "The British will be here soon, and we need her." Ilsa looked incredulous for a moment; they had called her here to and retrieve someone else. Joy. She was about to ask as to why they hadn't rung Karen Sanders, when he saw the question on her lips. "we've already tried calling her, and she doesn't answer." He had a pitiful smile on his face as he asked. "If you could just…" he left off, hoping she would get what he was trying to say.

She sighed before nodding her head. "Okay. I'll go see why she isn't responding to her summons." She walked towards the door before suddenly turning back around. "But you owe me." She said with a playful air and a smile before continuing her walk out.

As soon as she stepped out of the cab, she began running up to Karen Sanders' flat, bypassing the need to be buzzed in as it just so happened someone was walking out as soon as Ilsa arrived. She stepped off the lift on the eleventh floor and was about to knock on her door, but saw that her door was cracked open. That was never was a good thing, as horror movies had taught her, never a good thing at all. Ilsa, deciding her curiosity was too hard to deny, regardless of her lessons from horror movies, wasn't prepared for what she saw next. Karen, or what was left of her mangled body, was tied to a chair. Blood spattered the walls of her small flat. It looked like she had been torn apart. The books that had once been kept in an alphabetical order had been thrown around, their colourful covers now sporting splatters in one colour: blood red. Pieces of Karen's pale skin littered the floor, Ilsa not knowing why or how. And like taken from a scene in a horror movie, Karen's head stared at her from her bookshelf with gouged out eyes. Whoever did this was a monster, Ilsa thought as she sunk to her knees.

She kneeled there for an undetermined amount of time, hyperventilating until she finally realised her senses and called 999. She spoke in sobs on the phone, and at times doubted the operator could hear half of what she was saying. The kind operator stayed with her on her mobile for about ten minutes until the police came. By the time they arrived, she had stopped crying. She felt dead on the inside; cold and completely numb. A Sergeant Donovan took her hard-to-understand statement and looked at Ilsa warily, like she was going to fall over or start screaming. Everyone, she realised, was looking at her, and only then did she notice that she was shaking. Not sobbing any longer, just shaking uncontrollably.

Donovan took her to sit on a chair, one of the only ones that wasn't covered in blood, and left her there while she went and talked to an older man, probably in his early forties, whom, in a moment of clarity, heard the Sergeant call Lestrade. Her mobile phone suddenly beeped, and Ilsa numbly scratched at the folds of her pockets before retrieving it and looking down at it. She, as guessed, had gotten a text message. The number was blocked, which was strange because She never had before received a message from an unknown sender, not while she had this telephone number, anyway. She opened it and read. She had doubted if she could have felt any colder than she was. She was wrong, she thought as she stared at the words on the screen: _How do you like my artwork?_

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><p><strong><em>?<em>**


	2. The Nosy Neighbor

**Hey, I actually wrote another chapter! Lovely. So disclaimer again: I own nothing but my plot and OC(s). Remember, English is not my first tongue, so if something is wrong grammatically, let me know. If you have suggestions, also let me know, and as always, enjoy!**

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><p>Artwork? How was this artwork? Her friend was dead. Someone thought she was an example of artwork. Ilsa started to hyperventilate. This was all too much. She felt like she could feel Karen's missing eyes staring at her. She didn't notice that two new people were admitted to the room. A deep voice filled the room. "Who found her?" it asked someone, presumably Lestrade.<p>

"Ilsa?" another voice said. John. she looked up. Her new neighbor was very blurry, and she realized that her eyes had begun silently streaming down her face, sans actual sobbing.

"John."she acknowledged him in a cracked voice. He looked conflicted, like he was deciding to come and comfort her or to keep helping Sherlock with whatever he was doing, which involved taking a close inspection of her friend's head. Shaking her head, trying to get rid of her thoughts, she slowly got up and walked over to Lestrade and asked, "Can I leave now?" he nodded his head. She was about to walk back through the blood spattered room when a thought came; she hadn't shown the text on her mobile, the text that had presumably come from the killer. She quickly turned back to Lestrade, "Detective," she said pulling the text up on her phone, "I think you may want this." Without seeing what he had to say about the text, she ran out of the flat, past the blood splattered walls and her beheaded friend.

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><p>Her first thought was Aleksi Aho, her superior. She wanted to go into the Embassy, but it was too much at that moment to go in and inform her supervisor. Instead, she opted to call him, by finding the rare enough pay phone, using spare change she found in her pocket.<p>

"_Aho." _He answered in a brisk manner.

"Karen. She's dead." she began with a shaky voice, trying to collect herself. Flashes of her friend's flat went before her eyes.

"_How?"_ his voice rang out, shocked.

"Murdered." she took a deep breath, "I found her body, or at least what was left of it." she said in a monotone voice, because if she broke down, the tears wouldn't stop.

"_Is there anything I can do for you?"_ he asked in a hushed tone.

"No, no, I don't think so."

"_Well, I'm moving back your starting date. This can't have been easy on you, so start your work next wee_k." he said slowly, "So, l_et me know if I can do anything else for you."_ She was about to interrupt him when he said goodbye and ended the phone call abruptly. She needed to get her mind off of what she had just seen; she didn't need to be isolated with her thoughts.

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><p>She wandered back to Baker's Street, too distressed to get a cab. When she finally got there, and was unlocked her door, and had every intention of going to her bedroom, and breaking down. But as soon as she opened my door, that was no longer an option. Sherlock was sitting on her sofa, looking at a picture of herself and her brother. "Put that down." she said sharply. It was enough that he was in her flat. It was enough that he was on her sofa. But it was too much that he was holding up a picture of her brother. Her brother was out of bounds.<p>

He put the picture down slowly before saying: "I was wrong about you being a single child. What else was I wrong about?" He looked at Ilsa, with a question forming on his mind.

"That doesn't matter. Either talk to me what you came to talk to me about or get out." She was beyond livid at this point, although she didn't quite understand why. Maybe it was just his pompous air. She also knew that he was there, at least originally, to talk about what happened to Karen. She vaguely remember Mrs. Hudson telling me he was a detective of sorts, which would explain his and his flatmates reason for being at Karen's flat.

"And generally, Mr. Holmes, it's common courtesy to knock on someone's door to be let in, much less actually waiting for someone to be on the other side of the door." glaring at his face, she put down her keys.

"Why are you here?" she said in a surprisingly calm tone.

"How long have you known her?" She assumed he was talking about Karen, but Sherlock Holmes, in all of his perceived greatness, was weird.

"Karen?" He cocked his head slightly to his right side as if to say 'really?' in a condescending, unspoken tone.

"Twenty three years." His eyes took a step back.

"Another thing I was wrong about I see. How old were you when you first met her?"

"Five." He nodded his head.

"Why did you go to her flat this morning?"

"I _already_ told the police that, you idiot. You," she asked, clarifying, "personally want to know?" He stood, and nodded his head, getting an odd gleam in his eyes that disturbed her. "Then ask the police. Get out. Get out _now._" she shouted the last bit out at him. she normally wouldn't shout, but this was a special case; Sherlock Holmes apparently had no boundaries, and no tact. John had obviously heard Ilsa's high pitched shouting, because at that moment, she heard a rustling of fabric making its way down stairs, and into her flat, making it apparent it was John by the jumper he was wearing. Her jumper wearing neighbor took Sherlock by the arm and said,

"Sherlock, you can ask these questions later." John, looking between Ilsa and Sherlock, felt the tension in the air, and realised Ilsa had more than likely had not approved of his flatmate's entrance into her abode. He heaved Sherlock towards the door, while chiding him about picking locks. Sherlock did not resist, but just simply walked out of the room with an amused look on his face. She wondered briefly what she had just revealed about herself as she heard her two new neighbors bickering about social procedures. But that line of thinking could wait till later. She slowly walked toward her bedroom, to the private bath, and turned the water of the bathtub to scalding hot, as if the burning water could erase the images of that day.


End file.
